It's 8:35....

and almost everyone shorter than me is in bed. Ahh, life is good.

Today went smoother than I thought it would. It only took us a little while to get the District's shopping done at Walmart, then we had to go run a few other District errands, and we went to lunch and then did our own shopping.

I changed my perspective on a meat shopping today. I decided I needed to base what I considered a "good" price on meat on the price of hamburger (ground beef as Roan kept calling it in the store, "There's ground beef!" Not sure where that came from). After all, it's what I buy the most of. And with meat prices going up, it's necessary to change my perceptions on "good" prices. So today, keeping that perception in mind, I bought a turkey ($1.18/lb), 2 whole chickens ($.93/lb, I think), 5 lbs of hamburger (OK, OK, ground beef, if you wish) ($2.00/lb) and a package of pork chops (enough for one meal) for $1.65/lb on clearance. Having a different perspective means I got more variety with my limited grocery budget instead of what I had planned on purchasing to last us until March 9-5 lbs of hamburger and 4 chickens. This means we will have more nutritious, more varied choice of meals, which will make everyone happy. I'll get to pull out some older recipes I haven't used in awhile, including my recipe for stuffing to go with the turkey. Also means less beans and rice, which will make mama happy when she climbs into bed with a not so stinky daddy. For the record, I spent $100 today on the above mentioned meat, 10 lbs of potatoes, 10 lbs of sugar, a box of diapers and a few other grocery items. We'll have to buy more potatoes, probably, and milk, and maybe some pasta if I can.

I worked on my quarterly menu today. I got all of the breakfasts done. Working on lunches now. I expanded my rotating breakfast menu with some of the recipes I'd searched for on allrecipes.com for using the ingredients I had on hand. Our favorite new addition has been "dutch babies" which sounds morbid, but is actually very good.

I also did some thinking about increasing my food budget. For several years now my food budget has been $15 per person, per week, plus $15 misc food spending for $120/wk. Yes, I do manage to feed seven on this. I actually feed seven on far less than this right now. I have decided to increase my misc food spending (unannounced sale, clearance items, etc) to $25 per week, but nothing else will change. When I go shopping in March for my quarterly shopping, I will actually be shopping for 16 weeks, to take us through the end of June, in case something interferes with our ability to go to Pueblo to do the quarterly thing again right when we get paid. I'm budgeting $70 per week for the quarterly grocery shopping, so that I will have $25, plus the misc $25, to spend weekly on perishables and sale items. That means I'll have $1120 to spend on quarterly food. Right now I'm not sure this is logistically possible, because we are behind on some bills and my W2s still have not arrived so we haven't filed our taxes yet. We'll have my monthly paycheck, my incentive check, and Larry's incentive check, but we have to get caught up on bills first. We also have to get the kids' birth certificates. With Larry not working, we need to apply for medicaid, and we have to have birth certificates for that. But if we can't do quarterly grocery shopping, we will at least do monthly grocery shopping.

I'm wondering what other families of similar size realistically spend on food. I know most larger families have more frugal budgets, but I'm really curious.